Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

— Chapter 2 —

Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Simon Fraser University
©2011 Han, Kamber, and Pei. All rights reserved.
 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Summary
 Types of Data Sets
 Record
 Relational records
 Data matrix, e.g., numerical matrix,

timeout

season
coach

game
score
team

ball

lost
pla
crosstabs

wi
n
y
 Document data: text documents: term-
frequency vector
Document 1 3 0 5 0 2 6 0 2 0 2
 Transaction data
 Graph and network Document 2 0 7 0 2 1 0 0 3 0 0
 World Wide Web
Document 3 0 1 0 0 1 2 2 0 3 0
 Social or information networks
 Molecular Structures
 Ordered TID Items
 Video data: sequence of images
1 Bread, Coke, Milk
 Temporal data: time-series
 Sequential Data: transaction sequences 2 Beer, Bread
 Genetic sequence data 3 Beer, Coke, Diaper, Milk
 Spatial, image and multimedia: 4 Beer, Bread, Diaper, Milk
 Spatial data: maps 5 Coke, Diaper, Milk
 Image data:
 Video data:
Important Characteristics of Structured Data

 Dimensionality
 Curse of dimensionality
 Sparsity
 Only presence counts
 Resolution
 Patterns depend on the scale
 Distribution
 Centrality and dispersion
 Data Objects

 Data sets are made up of data objects.

 A data object represents an entity.
 Examples:
 sales database: customers, store items, sales
 medical database: patients, treatments
 university database: students, professors, courses
 Also called samples , examples, instances, data points,
objects, tuples.
 Data objects are described by attributes.
 Database rows -> data objects; columns ->attributes.
 Attributes
 Attribute (or dimensions, features, variables):
a data field, representing a characteristic or feature
of a data object.
 E.g., customer _ID, name, address

 Types:
 Nominal

 Binary

 Numeric: quantitative

 Interval-scaled

 Ratio-scaled
 Attribute Types
 Nominal:
 Nominal means “relating to names.” The values of a nominal

attribute are symbols or names of things.

 categories, states, or “names of things”

 Hair_color = {auburn, black, blond, brown, grey, red, white}

 marital status, occupation, ID numbers, zip codes
 Binary
 It is a Nominal attribute with only 2 states (0 and 1)
 Symmetric binary: both outcomes equally important
 e.g., gender
 Asymmetric binary: outcomes not equally important.
 e.g., medical test (positive vs. negative)
 Convention: assign 1 to most important outcome (e.g., HIV
positive)
 Ordinal
 Values have a meaningful order (ranking) but magnitude between
successive values is not known.
 Size = {small, medium, large}, grades, army rankings
 Numeric Attribute Types
 Quantity (integer or real-valued)
 Interval
 Measured on a scale of equal-sized units
 Values have order
 E.g., temperature in C˚or F˚, calendar dates
 No true zero-point
 Ratio
 Inherent zero-point
 We can speak of values as being an order of
magnitude larger than the unit of measurement
(10 K˚ is twice as high as 5 K˚).
 e.g., temperature in Kelvin, length, counts,
monetary quantities
 Discrete vs. Continuous Attributes
 Discrete Attribute
 Has only a finite or countably infinite set of values

 E.g., zip codes, profession, or the set of words in a

collection of documents
 Sometimes, represented as integer variables

 Note: Binary attributes are a special case of discrete

attributes
 Continuous Attribute
 Has real numbers as attribute values

 E.g., temperature, height, or weight

 Practically, real values can only be measured and

represented using a finite number of digits

 Continuous attributes are typically represented as

floating-point variables
 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Summary
 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data
 Motivation
 To better understand the data: central tendency,
variation and spread
 Data dispersion characteristics
 median, max, min, quantiles, outliers, variance, etc.
 Numerical dimensions correspond to sorted intervals
 Data dispersion: analyzed with multiple granularities
of precision
 Boxplot or quantile analysis on sorted intervals
 Dispersion analysis on computed measures
 Folding measures into numerical dimensions
 Boxplot or quantile analysis on the transformed cube
Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data
 Measuring the Central Tendency
 Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population): 1 n
x   xi   x
Note: n is sample size and N is population size. n i 1 N
n
Weighted arithmetic mean:
w x

i i
 Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values x i 1
n
 Median: w
i 1
i
 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of
the middle two values otherwise
 Mode
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 Empirical formula:

mean  mode  3  (mean  median)

Symmetric vs. Skewed Data
 Median, mean and mode of symmetric

symmetric, positively and

negatively skewed data

positively skewed negatively skewed

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

 Measuring the Dispersion of Data
 Quartiles, outliers and boxplots
 Quartiles: Q1 (25th percentile), Q3 (75th percentile)
 Inter-quartile range: IQR = Q3 – Q1
 Five number summary: min, Q1, median, Q3, max
 Boxplot: ends of the box are the quartiles; median is marked; add
whiskers, and plot outliers individually
 Outlier: usually, a value higher/lower than 1.5 x IQR
 Variance and standard deviation (sample: s, population: σ)
 Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)
1 n 1 n 2 1 n 2 1 n
1 n
s 
2

n  1 i 1
( xi  x ) 
2
[ xi  ( xi ) ]
n  1 i 1 n i 1
 
2

N

i 1
( xi  
2
) 
N
 xi   2
i 1
2

 Standard deviation s (or σ) is the square root of variance s2 (or σ2)

 Boxplot Analysis
 Five-number summary of a distribution
 Minimum, Q1, Median, Q3, Maximum
 Boxplot
 Data is represented with a box
 The ends of the box are at the first and third
quartiles, i.e., the height of the box is IQR
 The median is marked by a line within the
box
 Whiskers: two lines outside the box extended
to Minimum and Maximum
 Outliers: points beyond a specified outlier
threshold, plotted individually
 Properties of Normal Distribution Curve

 The normal (distribution) curve

 From μ–σ to μ+σ: contains about 68% of the

measurements (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation)

 From μ–2σ to μ+2σ: contains about 95% of it
 From μ–3σ to μ+3σ: contains about 99.7% of it
Graphic Displays of Basic Statistical Descriptions

 Boxplot: graphic display of five-number summary

 Histogram: x-axis are values, y-axis repres. frequencies
 Quantile plot: each value xi is paired with fi indicating
that approximately 100 fi % of data are  xi
 Quantile-quantile (q-q) plot: graphs the quantiles of
one univariant distribution against the corresponding
quantiles of another
 Scatter plot: each pair of values is a pair of coordinates
and plotted as points in the plane
 Quantile Plot
 A quantile plot is a simple and effective way to have a first look at a
univariate data distribution.
 First, it displays all of the data for the given attribute
 Second, it plots quantile information
 Quantile–Quantile Plot
 A quantile–quantile plot, or q-q plot, graphs the quantiles of one
univariate distribution against the corresponding quantiles of another.
 It is a powerful visualization tool in that it allows the user to view
whether there is a shift in going fromone distribution to another.
 Histogram Analysis
 “Histos” means pole or mast, and
“gram” means chart, so a histogram is
40
a chart of poles.
35
 Histogram: Graph display of tabulated
frequencies, shown as bars 30
 It shows what proportion of cases fall 25
into each of several categories 20
 Differs from a bar chart in that it is the
15
area of the bar that denotes the value,
not the height as in bar charts, a 10
crucial distinction when the categories 5
are not of uniform width 0
 The categories are usually specified as 10000 30000 50000 70000 90000

non-overlapping intervals of some

variable. The categories (bars) must
be adjacent
 Histogram Analysis
 The range of values is partitioned into disjoint consecutive subranges. The
subranges, referred to as buckets or bins, are disjoint subsets of the data
distribution.
 The range of a bucket is known as the width.
 Buckets (orbins) are defined by equal-width ranges

A histogram
Histograms Often Tell More than Boxplots

 The two histograms

shown in the left may
have the same boxplot
representation
 The same values
for: min, Q1,
median, Q3, max
 But they have rather
different data
distributions
 Scatter plot
 A scatter plot is one of the most effective graphical methods
for determining if there appears to be a relationship, pattern,
or trend between two numeric attributes.
 To construct a scatter plot, each pair of values is treated as
a pair of coordinates in an algebraic sense and plotted as
points in the plane.
 Scatter plot
 Provides a first look at bivariate data to see clusters of
points, outliers, etc
 Each pair of values is treated as a pair of coordinates and
plotted as points in the plane
 Explores the possibility of correlation relationships between
two attributes, X, and Y, are correlated if one attribute
implies the other.
 Correlations can be positive, negative, or null (uncorrelated).
Positively and Negatively Correlated Data

 The left half fragment is positively

correlated
 The right half is negative correlated
Uncorrelated Data
 Summary
 Data attribute types: nominal, binary, ordinal, interval-scaled, ratio-
scaled
 Many types of data sets, e.g., numerical, text, graph, Web, image.
 Gain insight into the data by:
 Basic statistical data description: central tendency, dispersion,
graphical displays
 Above steps are the beginning of data preprocessing.
 Many methods have been developed but still an active area of
research.
 References
 W. Cleveland, Visualizing Data, Hobart Press, 1993
 T. Dasu and T. Johnson. Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning. John Wiley, 2003
 U. Fayyad, G. Grinstein, and A. Wierse. Information Visualization in Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001
 L. Kaufman and P. J. Rousseeuw. Finding Groups in Data: an Introduction to Cluster
Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, 1990.
 H. V. Jagadish, et al., Special Issue on Data Reduction Techniques. Bulletin of the Tech.
Committee on Data Eng., 20(4), Dec. 1997
 D. A. Keim. Information visualization and visual data mining, IEEE trans. on Visualization
and Computer Graphics, 8(1), 2002
 D. Pyle. Data Preparation for Data Mining. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999
 S.  Santini and R. Jain,” Similarity measures”, IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence, 21(9), 1999
 E. R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed., Graphics Press,
2001
 C. Yu , et al., Visual data mining of multimedia data for social and behavioral studies,
Information Visualization, 8(1), 2009